Lee Blessing ’71 told a captive Reunions audience that he got his start “because kids
in Eliot were smoking dope.” Now a Pulitzer- and Tony-nominated playwright, Blessing was referring
to the fire that destroyed the theatre building in 1969. Legend has it that when fire engines came
screaming onto campus, students in Eliot thought it was a drug raid, flushed their stashes, and killed
the water pressure on campus. (“If it didn’t happen that way, it should have,” Blessing
teased.)

When theatre head Seth Ullman tried to raise funds for a new theatre, he came up short; but
he did land a playwriting grant. The English major accepted, and the rest is history.

Blessing made
it to Broadway in 1988 with Walk in the Woods, which has eclipsed every play he’s
written since. But Blessing spoke less about surviving a hit than surviving as a playwright, period,
given conservative theatre boards and dwindling ticket sales. Blessing keeps this image in mind when
he writes: “There’s a door at the end of every aisle and the audience has their hand on
the door handle. . . . They are dying to leave.”

When one Reedie said such classics as The Grapes
of Wrath still need to be staged, Blessing retorted: “The
great American stories don’t really need to be dramatized right now. I’d prefer new plays,
new great American stories.”